From the ‘We’re-Everywhere-We’re-Everywhere!’ file, the New York Times Magazine (Mar. 23) has an in-more-depth-than-the-interviewer-intended article on Shad Smith, a fighter in the variously named mixture of ‘… boxing, wrestling, jujitsu and other disciplines’ that has lately developed and gone mainstream. ‘Felony Fights’ is the most extreme of the lot and Smith is in the thick of it. He’s been in prison and he told the Times that he’d always been a fighter—he’d had 46 counts of assault and battery (that were recorded) as a kid. His interviewer asked why he looked for trouble so much as a child, expecting ‘some sort of cliched’ answer but what he got was ‘You know, bro, the sexual-preference thing.’ Smith is gay and the only out professional fighter of this type. ‘I was always scared that my mom and dad would find out and wouldn’t like me … I would try to be the toughest person around. That way, no one would ever say it, no one would ever think it.’ Smith, now 35, has just retired from Felony Fights and lives in his own house with his lover, parents, a brother and a niece. They apparently all live off the income of the sale of DVDs of Smith’s fights.
Don’t jump on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s minister, for his anti-gay stances, as one listener who called into NPR (Mar. 24) said. NPR did a little research and there aren’t any such views. In fact, Wright has supported gay ordination and personally formed a singles club for gays and lesbians in his church.
From the ‘Gay-As-High-Concept’ file, the New York Times (Mar. 17) reviews a new play ‘Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?’ by Caryl Churchill which is a ‘… 45-minute allegory about the seduction of Britain by the United States—presented as gay men locked in a seriously sick love affair.’ Think Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair. Wait, don’t do that. Churchill is such a skilled playwright that she’s able to make a political hay conflagration out of what in lesser hands would be a mere campfire.
From the ‘Dug-Out-of-Old-Closets’ file the Chicago Sun-Times (Mar.25) reports another of gay playwright Tennessee Williams’s ‘apprentice plays’ (his first dramas, penned in the Great Depression), Candles to the Sun, is being revived in Chicago. Candles to the Sun is a labor-union story of Alabama coal miners, with no apparent gay subtext.
From the ‘Converted-to-PETA’ file, the New York Times Book Review (Mar. 9) looks at a new book, How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet, in which a ‘… regular in-it-for-cash purveyor of tacky and upscale resorts’ undergoes a conversion of spur-of-the-moment, intense empathy for the animals he’s displacing. Helping by bad example is this developer’s suddenly out-of-the-closet father. Let’s hear it for the coyote-and-quail set.
Check out the new flick Stop-Loss about U.S. soldiers who’ve served in Iraq. The New York Times (Mar. 23) says director Kimberly Peirce (who has directed Boys Don’t Cry and an episode of The L Word) is on top of her form, although privately she’s in Jodie Foster mode: ‘Ms. Peirce demurs on the subject of her own sexuality, saying only that her partner is going to be a professor of gender sociology and Turkish literature in California.’ (Eminently traceable, my dear…)